Community Journalism/Applications
Contents
Potential Applications
Building Community Journalism Capacity
We aim to foster the collaborative development of a sustainable Open Education Resource (OER) ecosystem for Community Journalists to create, share, repurpose and reuse digital content in support of learning, skill development and the craft/profession. This is a project developed by journalists for journalists focusing on the 'Long Tail of Journalism' with the following themes:
- Community Journalism capability and community development
- Software and tools development to improve the usability and interoperability of the technology for newcomers to collaborative online authoring and content integration with appropriate technology platforms.
- Seeding OER content development for use in community journalism locally, nationally and internationally.
- Journalism education research projects.
Journalism schools can gradually adapt face-to-face / online courses and modules to provide learners / students with access to ongoing peer and expert social and informal learning opportunities, with online mentoring support, in a socially networked Learning Community.
Journalism Leadership and Collaboration
New and mainstream journalists can collaborate in online journalism courses (i.e., citizen journalism in a mobile world; use of newly-available databases and resources - locally, nationally and globally) to increase their leadership and skill development and explore innovative, participatory, and interdisciplinary models for greater (citizen) engagement for:
- News / feature writing and reporting - locally, nationally, and internationally;
- Online journalism publications (i.e., different publications for diverse markets - OER New Zealand & OER NZ Newspaper);
- Virtual competency development (i.e., co-ops, internships, coaching and mentoring at a distance). This can include: (i.e., news reporting on WikiEducator's community; sectoral reporting in agriculture, local government; public health, environment, resources, etc; supporting NGO's in Africa, such as Regional AIDS Network in Kenya, Community Media in South Africa and Tanzania, etc.), and mentoring and coaching from news professionals at a major city newspaper);
- Sharing best practices, knowledge translation and intercultural learning;
- Journalism education and interdisciplinary research.
Community Journalism Learning Community
A pilot project approach could support the development of a Community Journalism Learning Community using social media, which:
- is strategically-designed and aligned to organizational vision, mission and culture
- is an inclusive and participatory action-oriented model for continuous engagement across time and distance
- is designed with appropriate curricula and pedagogic capacities, with key stakeholder champions and influencers who are engaged, coached and mentored to lead within the larger community and sub-communities to sustain innovation, change and growth;
- sustainably and scalably evolves existing face-to-face and elearning training into ongoing global networked conversations and facilitate competency development and leadership behaviour, and
- leverages WikiEducator's successful Learning4Content wiki skills initiative,which has trained 3500 learners in 110+ countries in 18 months, by incorporating journalism content into a proven delivery package to reach hundreds and thousands of new and community journalists in Canada and around the globe;
- incorporates a research and evaluation piece to disseminate and implement the latest evidence for improving Community Journalism as a professional field of interest.
